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Amiga Ireland 2024

22 January 2024

It's that time of year again, when I load up the car with Amiga gear and make the three hour journey to Athlone in central Ireland. Amiga Ireland is upon us once more.

Amiga Ireland is always a cosy event, more of a large user group meeting than an highly organised retro event. That the primary organisers are wandering around the floor and taking part highlights this. 2024 was no exception, and actually less organised than previous years by design. No official meal on the first night and a less packed scheduled made this year more freeform. It worked, for me.

[IMG: Amiga Ireland 2024]

Rogue Declan

I spent most of the weekend running the Rogue Declan knockout competition. You might imagine that a simple knockout tournament with 16 players wouldn't take much work, but it was well into Saturday afternoon before we had our finalists! The final was a close run best of three in the game's 5-minute time limit mode, with Amiga Addict's Ian "PixelsAtDawn" narrowly losing out to Nathan "N8SuperGamer" Szlapka in the end. Keeping with the theme of the game, Nathan's prize was a small chest with a commemorative plaque, filled with treasure (chocolates) and a number of metal medieval Knight figures. Hurrah for Sir Nathan!

I used two A500's, each equipped with a wireless PS4 controller via a Unijoysticle2 adapter, which attracted a lot of interest on its own. Plus an Amiga Mini for practice and general messing around on by anyone.

[IMG: Rogue Declan A500s]

BadgerPunch

However, my table was eclipsed by the BadgerPunch team's spread for their upcoming game, Roguecraft. They had badges, flyers and dedicated monitor with the trailer on a loop, which I should really have prepared something like to promote the pending boxed editions of Rogue Declan. Ricki and Henning, bringing the pro from Norway. Roguecraft rightly had a lot of attention, with one player almost completing the game after a solid two hour session.

[IMG: BadgerPunch Games]

Amiga Things

BadgerPunch, myself, and a number of other developers also took part in a gentle Q&A session on stage on Saturday afternoon. A fireside chat about past and future projects, tools we used and so on. I hope it was interesting for the audience at least.

[IMG: Amiga Ireland 2024 Developer Panel]

There were also a few quizzes during the day, including "Name That Amiga Tune" where the tune was played on acoustic guitar, and "Name The Game From Its Palette" where I won a box of chocolates for recognising Battle Squadron's pink hues.

As usual, there was a wide variety of Amiga hardware and software on display to poke about at. Rob Smith had a MiSTer Multisystem that he had added actual floppy drives to with some hardware wizardry. Casual Retro Gamer had a massive CD32 arcade joystick setup that I was able to test the beta Rogue Declan CD32 build on. Rob Cranley had a Solas-equipped A1200 on show. Mixels had his Wizonk and Creeping Me Out games available to play, super fun and impressive respectively. I also saw a BlizzardPPC and BVision setup in real life for the first time - I really wanted one of those back in the day! We also had a selection of PowerPC AmigaNG hardware, several AmigaMini, and I think a Vamipre or two as well.

[IMG: CRG's CD32 arcade board]

A600GS

A very interesting development on show was AmigaKit's prototype "A600GS" machine. It probably deserves a post on its own, but you could think of it as an AmigaMini-like that's more capable and open. As well as games, it comes with a full Workbench-like environment, and has automatic updates for installed Amiga software.

They have big plans for this little box. In the pipe are an integrated online software store and live game features like updates, leaderboards and competitions. I talked over some of these features with Matthew from AmigaKit in detail, and hopefully gave them some things to think about from a modern Amiga games developer's perspective. Hopefully, because I'm not sure their original plans would have worked too well.

As it's open to new content and always online, the A600GS could reach new audiences that Amiga developers can't access at present. You get locked into your own bubbles and think your game is well-known, but then something like Amiga Ireland comes along and you find folk who are active Amiga users but have never heard of it. More eyes has to be good, right?

I'm quite excited about the A600GS, really. I was sending people from my table up to the AmigaKit stand to take a look. I'm hoping to get hold of a preview unit soon to do some prodding.

[IMG: A600GS Prototype]

Wrapping Up

Another change for 2024 was the lack of organised meetup after the show. Previously, a room in a local bar was booked for the Saturday evening, but it was always very crowded and busy. In the spirit of 2024's more low-key approach, this year nothing was booked but we had the venue room in the hotel left open until late. After accquiring some pizza, and a shower at my hotel, I returned to the venue and a good number of us sat around, stuck a demoscene playlist on the projector, and had a few drinks and craic. It was much more pleasant (and cheaper) than packing ourselves in to a busy bar on peak Athlone Saturday night. Maybe we're all at that sort of age now? We did move on to a local bar later on for a lock-in though. It wouldn't be Ireland without that.

Amiga Ireland. I definitely preferred the more low-key style this time. Utterly enjoyable and utterly exhausting. The weekend passes in a flash, but I'm not sure I could take another day of it. Roll on the next one all the same!

See you in Athlone? Ah, go on.

[Ah, go on. Ya will, ya will, ya will]